On simplicity…

How I used to think about simplicity. And how my thinking has evolved.

I used to be obsessed with simplicity. Most of my earlier notes from more than a decode ago are about simplicity. There was a time when I thought that if I ever write a book it will be about simplicity. Of course, there are many such books already. And looking at my extensive collection of notes, I seem to have read most of them.

I wanted to figure out how to make things — software in particular — simpler. But I saw value of simplicity beyond just software. Simplicity always seemed like something fundamentally good and valuable to me — something beautiful.

A few days ago a section about how I used to think about simplicity in the past and how my thinking about it has evolved materialized in my Morning Pages. I let it sit there for a few days, until I thought, “Hey, I could write a newsletter about it!” So I copied the text into a new note and searched for “simplicity” in my various note taking apps¹, to get a feel for what I know about the topic.

Turns out I had quite a few notes about that topic. And because all my notes about Christopher Alexander’s The Nature of Order were in there too, I was instantly reminded that he also has a lot to say about that. Several hours of reviewing many forgotten notes later, I concluded that this is going to be a substantial piece of utmost importance, and hence you’re now reading a mediocre piece about how I wasn’t able to finish it yet. And, let’s be frank, how it slowly but steadily becomes more and more unlikely that I will ever publish such masterpiece.

But then I remembered how this blog newsletter started. Had I approached my attempted explanation of Alexander’s Mirror of the Self with cognitive science I learned from John Vervaeke as a substantial piece of writing that required lots of research and careful planning before it can be published as the best piece I could possibly write at this point in time, you’d still be waiting to hear about it.

Instead I tricked myself into tackling months of work of trying to connect all the pieces together by writing one article a week that would just be an honest attempt to make progress towards that larger mission, one step at a time. I fully accepted that there will be many steps in the form of individual posts that I won’t be terribly happy with. But I also acknowledged that even those steps are bringing me closer towards my goal. It all worked out in the end.

Maybe it’s time for another series like that. I don’t think it will be nearly as extensive as the Original Series™ which ultimately spanned 26 newsletters written over more than half a year. But I sense that simplicity is another key concept that deeply integrates with everything I wrote about here in the past.

And who knows, maybe it’s the missing piece to finally bring all that abstract cognitive science and design theory into a much more practical and applicable context of software design and programming practice?

So where do we start?
Ah, of course…

What is simplicity?

Simplicity appears to be… yes, I know, but it has to be done… surprisingly complex.

Instead of attempting a definition right away, let me tell you what I wrote down about what I thought simplicity is, and how my thinking has recently evolved.

In the past…

1. I wanted to make things simpler.

2. I thought simplicity is an objective property of a thing. It may be difficult to describe, but it resides in the thing. It’s somehow part of its structure.

3. I described things that exhibit this objective property as “simple”.

4. I concluded logically:
   If something is complex, it can’t be simple.

   If something is simple, it can’t be complex.

5. I admitted that it’s not straightforward to determine where the line is.
   However, often it appears that “we know it when we see it.”

6. I assumed simplicity is about reducing complexity, which involves achieving more with less, somehow limiting the kind and amount of components that make up a thing.

7. I was confident that almost everything can be made simpler, and that there are plenty of ways to do so, and I was optimistic that we are capable of finding at least some of them.

8. I thought that by making things simpler, we would get rid of complexity, and that doing so was worthwhile and valuable.

9. I believed there is a difference between reducing complexity and merely hiding it, and reducing would be superior over hiding. I struggled, however, to understand what exactly that difference is.

10. I was convinced that almost everything should be made as simple as possible (but not simpler ;). And that we have some kind of obligation to attempt this.

What do you think about this list? I think it’s pretty straightforward and uncontroversial.
Do you agree with it? All of it? Does it reflect your thinking?
I’m genuinely interested so please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments (on the web version of this newsletter) below or reply to this email.

I sincerely hope that you think this is a good list. I thought so myself for most of my life. It was just in the last few years that I noticed some things in that list didn’t really make sense to me anymore and needed a little more… differentiation.

Today…

1. I want to make things easier to understand.
   “Simpler” isn’t all that helpful, because it’s like the word “better” — it’s not quite obvious what it actually means. And apparently it means different things to different people. “Easier to understand” captures my intention more crisply, when I want something to be “simpler”.

2. Simplicity depends on both the objective structure of a thing and your subjective experience of it.
   Making something easier to understand may involve changing it, but it may also involve changing yourself — by changing your perspective. How easy something is to understand depends on both it and you — how the thing is structured and how you make sense of its structure.
   This breaks objectivity! But that doesn’t just make it subjective either. (Spoiler alert: it’s more like a transjective, co-identified relationship.)

3. Instead of thinking of things as intrinsically simple, I now think of them as being coherent so that they are more intelligible. That coherence comes from their structural-functional organization, but is only intelligible if it pairs up effectively with our way of experiencing it — we need to be able to make sense of it.

4. Something incredibly complex can be amazingly simple.
   Simple things appear simple to us, when we are familiar with their structure and it makes sense to us. Once we familiarize ourselves with something, such that we deeply understand it, it becomes simpler to us.
   Its structure didn’t change. We did. And that confuses the hell out of people who didn’t change with us.
   This means simplicity and complexity are not opposite ends on a spectrum but less correlated and potentially independent dimensions.

5. Simplicity shares a lot of similarities with beauty and fittedness.
   “We know it when we see it” is a tell that our subconscious S1 processing is at work and that with enough exposure and experience our implicit learning machinery provides us with the intuition to spot what is simple.

6. Reduction is a great option, if unnecessary, irrelevant, or confusing parts are present. But is it sufficient? We may not be able to further reduce the complexity that’s left. We can, however, always reorganize it.
   More important than reducing complexity is how we organize the complexity that is there. Simplicity is not the absence of complexity, but the superior organization of complexity.

7. We may not always be able to find ways to make something more coherent and comprehensible. This is surprisingly difficult to do because it cannot be intentionally achieved systematically but has to be discovered through a creative process. And we usually don’t reserve that much time for such a process to properly unfold.

8. We don’t really want to get rid of complexity, because complexity is what makes things interesting. Things without complexity are boring and trivial. Comprehensible complexity fascinates us. The more complex something is, while still being comprehensible to us, the more mesmerized we are. Think of music, games, art. We crave complexity. If it is presented to us in an intelligible way.

9. We mostly hide complexity in such a way that we accept to ignore certain complex and unintelligible parts of a thing as long as it provides utility or convenience. We are culturally accustomed to consider a thing simple, if its utility is convenient to access, even though we have no idea how it works. I think this is a misguided interpretation of simplicity and a fundamental problem that prevents us from designing things holistically, because how could we design a better whole if we don’t understand the whole thing?

10. I see tremendous value in forgoing the hiding approach, embracing our ignorance, and revealing complexity while trying to organize it in more comprehensible ways. Hiding and ignoring complexity makes us dependent on things we don’t understand.
    To design simpler things, we need to understand them thoroughly. I don’t buy that “the world has become so complex that we can’t expect to understand everything anymore”, when most of that world has been designed by us. If that’s where we are today, it is our own fault.

Now what do you think about this list? I reckon this is a list that is more difficult to accept and a lot more controversial than the first one.

These 10 points will serve as a great anchor and structure to explore each of them in more detail in future posts.
Again, please feel free to share your thoughts in the comments (on the web version of this newsletter) below or reply to this email.

But wait! We can’t stop here without at least a glimpse on…

Christopher Alexander’s take

[As usual, highlights mine.]

The creation of simplicity is a constant struggle. Not only is one removing, cutting, pruning, so as to lay bare the structure of what exists, uncluttered. That is hard enough.
But one has to maintain a continuous awareness that our present use of the word “simple” is contaminated and erroneous.

In the 20th century we assumed that to be simple is to use drastic geometric shapes lacking in structure. Yet nature teaches us that what is truly simple — a waterfall say — is vastly complex — as a structure — and yet vastly simple in its essence.
Thus we must strive for something which is utterly simple, in the sense that there is nothing unwanted there, nothing extra.
At the same time we know that if we succeed in being truly simple, we reach a fine filigree of levels upon levels in which every part is unique, each adapted to the one unique spot in the world where it lies.

It is the geometry, this pattern of pure organization, which has the ability to connect us to the universe, to mobilize our feeling, to induce deep feeling in us — and to connect us to ourselves. It does not really matter what the “content” is.
When we listen to a Mozart piano concerto, or Beethoven’s quartet #14 in C-sharp minor — the music has tremendous meaning. Obviously, this does not happen in a practical realm. The thing which has this effect on me is a pure organization of sound.

In architecture, the same is true. Although the real content is there all the time, in the background — and although it is real human life, ecological life, and social and spiritual life which is at stake — still, too careful or too penny-pinching a regard for these practical problems will always produce trivial results. What matters is the organization itself, the geometric organization — and the ability of this geometric organization to penetrate to the core of being human.
So, what matters in the building is the pure physical pattern of the centers, how deep it reaches, how far it manages to go in activating my feeling. My effort, in making the building, must constantly be to create, and activate, a pure pattern of physical geometry — ultimately material and light — and the depth of the impact which this pure pattern of organization has on me, on my self, on my soul — to what extent it mobilizes my feeling.

Even knowing this, as I do, it is such a struggle to keep on with the geometry. In painting, I try to make a realistic scene. I look at the life there. I try to make the picture come to life, and half of me is asking, What makes it real? What makes it real? I try to paint what I see. But I have to shout at myself, all the time, play, play, play, stop worrying about realism. Just make sure the actual shapes are beautiful, and that the geometry works, that the arrangement of the shapes is beautiful.
This means all the shapes, the space between things, and the things, and the shadows, the creases, the fold in the tree trunk. Each shape must be beautiful, supporting the other shapes. This is an incessant work. I have to keep forcing myself, reminding myself. That is why the idea that the spirit and the life, in the end, lie only in the geometry, has to be repeated every day, every morning, every afternoon.
In building, the same thing. More difficult, even, because it is more obvious. I work hard, hour after hour, month after month, I try to make the building right. I pay attention to the passage, the width, the length, the feeling, the light, the comfort, the size of the window, and so on. Always I am trying to make it comfortable. But again, what I have to do, to make it live, every shape must be beautiful. The window sill. The top of the column. The door. The window over the door. The wall between the windows. The edge of the roof. Is it the most beautiful I can make it? Just don’t forget. Just don’t forget. Keep doing it. It is only when I do that, have joyful fun, do nothing else, just keep on doing that, to make each shape beautiful, that the thing begins to gain its life. It ought to be easy. But it is so hard.
O Gauguin.

Christopher Alexander • The Nature of Order
Book 2: The Process of Creating Life
Chapter 17: Simplicity — Final Section on Simplicity

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Mirror of the Self is a fortnightly newsletter series investigating the connection between creators and their creations, trying to understand the process of crafting beautiful objects, products, and art.

Using recent works of cognitive scientist John Vervaeke and design theorist Christopher Alexander, we embark on a journey to find out what enables us to create meaningful things that inspire awe and wonder in the people that know, use, and love them.

If you are new to this series, start here: 01 • A secular definition of sacredness.
Overview and synopsis of articles 01-13: Previously… — A Recap.
Overview and synopsis of articles 14-26: Previously… — recap #2.

Another great way to start is my recent presentation Finding Meaning in The Nature of Order.

1. I have several note taking apps for historical reasons. Don’t ask. Also, don’t believe anyone who says because it’s all Markdown in text files migration would be trivial.